They don’t send me on these away missions often. As the main healer of our humble establishment, they prefer to keep in backup. So I sit there in my room and spend most of my day reading and occasionally treating a minor bruise or a cough someone caught and is then convinced he’s dying (I’m looking at you, Hwarnë). Sometimes, something interesting happens. I remember when we got attacked by that Iron Horde task force and the darfellan guest stepped right into a patch of poison Aeresham dropped, so I had to work my non-existent ass off to treat an alien poison on an alien individual. I’m not complaining, I like a good challenge. It’s different when I get to go on a mission. The field healing magic may not be exact and leave some ailments untreated, but it’s an interesting change of pace.

I’m not on the research staff, so most of the days I have a fair share of free time when I’m done producing potions and overseeing the gnolls and the broken draenei in my production room. Then I go out and try to chat up a few people in our “village” and realize how busy or tired most of them are. Yesterday evening when I was done with work, I went to look for Orkan and found him in Verroak’s room, working on some solution they were preparing together. He had no time for me, so I thought I’d check some other important people around here. I checked Theramas first, and he was still in his lab. He never seems to tire. I know what he is in reality, but it still seems strange. For two days straight he’s been in his lab, working on spells to treat his mental patients. And he wasn’t the only researcher busy with work either. Zovaar was working on those enchanted information disks, and he even got Podric to help him. I kept wandering around until I found the boss in the security quarters – or mission control, as he started calling it recently.

It’s rare to see an angry draenei. I don’t mean they’re rare, it’s just rare to see them, because they’re usually angry when no one can see them. They like to pretend they’re above our petty emotions, but they’re just as much subject to them as everyone else. They’re just very… conceited about their emotional state and hide it under layers of seeming self-control. But sometimes, you can actually find one that appears openly angry and even pursues a personal agenda. I talked to one of those some time ago. His name is Zovaar, and he traveled in time attempting to bring back his family. He apparently used to be a paladin but got broken and went with some krokul into this temporal escapade. Imagine my surprise when this (lesser) enemy of the Timewalkers shows up on my doorstep.

You may or may not have noticed our semi-regular RP sessions, where we continue our plots and play out the continued events of my design. If you did not notice, every once in a while, although shooting for not more rarely than once per week, we gather at 8 PM CEST and take our characters into various worlds out in the Twisting Nether that I invented – worlds that are still clearly part of the Warcraft setting, although these worlds are not Azeroth, nor did they have any contact with it. While still remaining within the setting, they give us a fresh perspective on it. In those sessions, we continue established plots and let me assure you, every hanging plot thread is going to be resolved, time allowing. The other thing that we’re missing, other than time, is people.

It’s hard to write anything definitive about the Xa’tac civilization. Most people out there among the stars know them only as “Deathlords of Xa’tac”, but in this way they omit the long history of the Xa’tac people, most of which wasn’t that different from histories of other worlds – as in, not filled with gruesome ritual sacrifices and enslavement of millions into undeath. They have come to be known in this way due to their short and brutal rule of many worlds and the campaign of conquest that enslaved and completely exterminated multiple worlds. They became a threat so powerful the Burning Legion itself stepped up to destroy them. And once they were wiped out to the last man, the demons were content to simply fly away and never look back. The Deathlords of Xa’tac became a boogeyman that mothers scared unruly children with. But we can’t forget where they came from and how they became what they were.

For the longest time, I’ve been stuck on this groundling world with no way out, nor any way to meet more of my kind. All I had were these unfamiliar, strange people and too often I had to even pretend I’m something different. And now I’m in luck, because Krasha managed to open a portal to another world, one more familiar to me. I mean, it was just gnomes at first, and I don’t really like them (who does?) but it was the Gnadra Confederacy. Finally, I was back in a familiar territory. I would run back to my homeworld using this opportunity but I actually managed to get a well-paying job here, with the opportunity to use the knowledge that would have been useless on Wawhira, but to my present employer it’s gold. I’m back out of “miraculous trader” and into “interstellar guide”!

Character: Captain Matus T. Manks of the Venture, boldly going where no gnome has gone before
The day began very usually. We read through the “nightly” shift’s mining reports and prepared for our work the following day. I must say living on a world tidally-locked to its sun can wreck one’s sense of time quite well. This red dwarf is stuck in eternal sunset and no matter when you wake up or when you go to sleep, you will always see the same amount of light, and our bodies are set to identify how tired they are by the amount of light in the environment. After spending a month on the duty of protecting the grav miners here, I find myself lying awake in bed for the whole time designated as “night” on our timetables, and then feeling completely tired for the whole “day”. But that was by far the least odd thing that happened to me yesterday.